Innocent
by lakesideblues
Summary: She hasn't been innocent for a long time.


She wakes up screaming, still reaching for something that she can't remember, the heat of the flames still warming her skin.

It's always the same thing.

Some nights, most, in fact, she sees terrible things as she sleeps. People dying and hurting and destroying each other and themselves. Uther likes to think that he keeps her sheltered and safe in this castle, that nothing will ever harm her, that she'll stay innocent.

She hasn't been innocent for a long time.

When she was twelve, a trio of children had come to the castle, orphaned nobility left over from the skirmishes against Odin. The siblings, Annette, Evan, and Elaine had been great fun to run and play with, but were quickly fostered out together to one of the barons on the border with Mercia. The night they left, she'd dreamed about their arrival at the estate where they would be living. It was not a happy one, and the abuses they suffered at the hands of their caretakers left her screaming and weeping until she was sick. She'd woken just after seeing them given as a gift to a Mercian lord whose tastes were not spoken of in polite company. When she'd tried to tell someone, Gaius, Uther, she'd been bundled off to her room and given a potion to help her rest. Her nurse had been blamed for putting ideas into her head and was whipped and sent off without wages.

She'd decided that if sleep was the problem, then she just...wouldn't.

She'd stayed awake for six days before Gwen had caught her at it. She developed a headache that wouldn't go away and became so nauseous she could barely eat. After the second time she'd almost walked off the edge of the stairwell in the east tower, Gwen had frantically gone to Gaius who had come with his useless potions and his quiet words that never really solved anything.

When she told him that she didn't want to sleep, didn't want to dream, didn't want to see death and pain and suffering, he'd shushed her, looking around to make certain that they were alone in the hall, and told her to try not to let her imagination get the best of her. Later, she'd overheard him telling the king that perhaps her reading materials should be screened. Her tutor, a kind older gentleman whose wife baked the best pies, found himself turned out of Camelot entirely for exposing her to "inappropriate content". There was little she could do other than press a few coins and some loose jewelry into his wife's hand before she was dragged away.

She pretended to sleep for a while, laying in bed with her eyes almost shut, Gwen in the chair near the window, and counted the number of times she could hear the guards pass by her door on their nightly rounds. Counted their footsteps. And when that became too boring, she counted the number of breaths she took, the number of times her heart beat, the number of times Gaius came into the room to check that she still slept. And that worked too, for a while.

The eighth day, she caught Gaius slipping a potion into her food, and she stopped eating. She doesn't remember much after that. It's a haze of conversations she can't recall and sentences that made no sense. There was shouting and pleading and at one point, she remembers someone begging her to just close her eyes, just to sleep, but she thinks that no one listened to her and even the shouting is better than the whips or the hands or the chains. At one point, she thinks she's Elaine and then there's screaming again.

The next time that she's aware, she's waking up in her room. She has bruises on her arms and legs, and her face hurts like someone squeezed her jaw very tightly. She can hear someone moving around the room, and the humming tells her it's Gwen, but she can't turn her head to look. She feels so weak, empty and light like she could float away if someone touched her. Like ash in a fireplace. Her bedclothes are the only things holding her down.

Her skin feels raw and her eyes itch. She breathes in, but not too deeply because her lungs don't seem to want to work right. The sound is loud in the quiet room, and Gwen rushes to her side, babbling about worries and Gaius and hugging her and weeping. Uther comes and embraces her, and his eyes are wet.

Even Arthur, arrogant little brat that he is, stops by. He doesn't really say anything, just stands in the doorway for a long moment. When Gwen says his name, he just glances at her before walking up to the bed and touching her hand. His head bows briefly, and there's a little hitch in his breathing, and then it's over and done, and he nods and walks back out.

That night, after everyone's left her alone, after they've stopped touching her and holding her and wetting her skin with their tears, she goes to the window and waits to float away. But nothing happens. Her feet stay on the ground, and her nightdress still scrapes roughly against her body, and she can still hear herself breathing.

_She hurt them_, she thinks. _She hurt everyone_. Gwen, Uther, even Arthur. Pain is bad and dark and wrong, and people who cause pain are bad and dark and wrong, which means she is bad and dark and wrong and...and...evil. She's evil. And maybe this is her punishment. These images, these sounds, this knowledge. It's her penance. And she cries, because if she's been evil already, then who knows how much worse she'll be when she's older. What will she have to see then to balance her crimes?

The next day, she lets Gwen help her into the new dress Uther gave her to celebrate her waking, and she goes down to the hall. She sits at the table, laughs at the jests made by noblemen old enough to be her father, feigns interest in their conversation. She dances with Arthur, who keeps looking at his feet and holds her too tightly.

Maybe he thinks she's going to float away, too.

She goes back to her rooms and her bed. She wakes up screaming into her pillows, tears ruining the fabric and soaking the feathers inside. When Gwen rushes in, she makes up a story about a rat and orders a bath. Briefly alone and behind a screen, she lets herself scream under the water until she has no more air, and it takes more effort than she expected to make herself sit back up. Underwater, she can float, and for a moment it feels like rest, relief, like something she hasn't had in a long, long time. But then Gwen comes back, and she has to stand again because she doesn't want anyone to cry over her anymore.

Penance.

Eventually, Arthur stops watching her out of the corners of his eyes, stops gripping her just a little bit too tightly. Gwen stops checking on her several times a night. Things go back to normal. And time passes.

She gets thicker pillows and softer nightdresses and has her door replaced with thicker wood. She learns that screaming underwater doesn't really count. She smiles and converses and dazzles those who cross her path. She pretends that everything is fine.

And when she wakes up each time, smelling smoke and death, feeling tears and blood and pain, she reminds herself that she deserves this. She's earned this.

She's the Lady Morgana, and she's evil.


End file.
